Northrop Frye quotes - page 2

The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning. (Northrop Frye)
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
Northrop Frye
We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.
Northrop Frye
The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.
Northrop Frye
Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.
Northrop Frye
The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.
Northrop Frye
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
Northrop Frye
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Northrop Frye
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
Northrop Frye
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition. (Northrop Frye)
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
Northrop Frye
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
Northrop Frye
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
Northrop Frye
The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.
Northrop Frye
The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.
Northrop Frye
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
Northrop Frye
A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
Northrop Frye
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
Northrop Frye
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world. (Northrop Frye)
The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts...Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.
Northrop Frye
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and where we have to surrender precision for flexibility.
Northrop Frye
No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.
Northrop Frye
Nothing is more remarkable in the Bible than the absence of argument...Argument is internal continuity. So is logical sequence in narrative: in the Bible the connectives are just "and."
Northrop Frye